Home|Global News|From The Trojan Horse To The Golden Calf—The Power Of Deceit

From The Trojan Horse To The Golden Calf—The Power Of Deceit

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By William A. Cook

09 June, 2013
Countercurrents.org

Little in this world is new but the means to do it; our actions and our behaviors are but regurgitations of our heritage. Our Western world gorges on its past and glorifies in it. Our children memorize and are mesmerized by the deeds of heroic figures the likes of Achilles and Oedipus, glorified by the great chronicler Homer, deeds done with power and deceit. Our children and our adults flock even now in 2004 to witness the fall of Troy with Brad Pitt extolling the virtues of Achilles and Sean Bean acting the sly Odysseus. Our hearts and our desires throb to theirs; we faint and flutter at their heroics as we witness the carnage of their exploits and the splendor of their victories.

Our minds find the means to their ultimate success in the deception fabricated by Odysseus, the great Trojan Horse, a monstrous sculpted symbol of conceded victory offered by the Greeks to their vanquishers. Our minds marvel at the simplicity of the deception, a mixture of apparent kindness, of supplication, of forgiveness, of beauty, of hopefulness, but ultimately our minds recognize the power of the mental cruelty that creates out of such darkness the power to destroy, to massacre, to devastate, to cripple, to maim, to slaughter the lives of all who lived and loved and prayed behind the walls of Troy. We do not anticipate that Priam or Hector or the wives of Troy will be our guides through this mayhem, just those with the power, the will, the means to deceive; in that mixture rests success.

How appropriate the film appeared in 2004 as Ariel Sharon forced the world to conceptualize a 21 st century power as it constructs a wall to incarcerate an indigenous people, walling them in as opposed to storming their wall to destroy them. Done we are told to defend the state of Israel, not to continue in this new civilized century the slow motion genocide of the Palestinians. How unfortunate that the Israeli military, with the fourth largest state of the art assemblage of weaponry on the planet, cannot defend itself against a people that have no military at all. How to convince the world that they are the victims not the Palestinians? To deceive or not to deceive is not the question; the question is what is the means of deception since one cannot put a sculptured horse inside the Bantustans that constitute the mythological state of Palestine.

Today, John Kerry, our new Secretary of State, flits around the mid–east by phone or jet to proffer a last stand “peace” talk initiative between Netanyahu and Abbas with the trump card held above their respective heads that the US will withdraw from its role as interlocutor leaving the two parties to solve their differences on their own, something a kin to Achilles hauling the dead Hector behind his chariot around his Father’s city to the delight of his mercenaries. Think of it: without the deception that America offered to the world, a pseudo-determined effort to control Israeli expansion further into Palestinian land and their ostensible state, Netanyahu can further corral the millions of Palestinians into tighter and tighter quarters as Settlers (read squatters) steal yet more of what’s left of Mandate Palestine. As long as Netanyahu can count on the US veto in the Security Council, he has nothing restraining his efforts to rid the land of Arabs as his Zionist predecessors so desired.

Kerry’s pitiful efforts reflect the reality of the fictitious peace talks that the US, the “objective broker” since 1967, has presented to the world. Here are the words of Dr. Jeff Halper in his article “The Problem with Israel” published in The Plight of the Palestinians , November 23, 2006.

Let’s be honest (for once): The problem in the Middle East is not the Palestinian people,

not Hamas, not the Arabs, not Hezbollah or the Iranians or the entire Muslim world. It’s

us, the Israelis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the single greatest cause of instability,

extremism and violence in our region, is perhaps the simplest conflict in the world to

resolve. For almost 20 years, since the PLO’s recognition of Israel within the 1949

Armistice Lines (the “Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and Gaza),

every Palestinian leader, backed by large majorities of the Palestinian population, has

presented Israel with a most generous offer: A Jewish state on 78% of Israel/Palestine in

return for a Palestinian state on just 22% – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. In

fact, this is a proposition supported by a large majority of both the Palestinian and Israeli

peoples. As reported in Ha’aretz(January 18, 2005):

Some 63 percent of the Palestinians support the proposal that after the establishment of the state of Palestine and a solution to all the outstanding issues – including the refugees and Jerusalem – a declaration will be issued recognizing the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people and the Palestinian state as the state of the Palestinian people…On the Israeli side, 70 percent supported the proposal for mutual recognition.

Halper goes on to establish the deceit of the Zionist governments in Israel as they pretend to desire peace talks and a resolution to a two state solution when in fact the Israelis have prevented any attempts by the Palestinians to achieve peace in the 19 efforts he lists. A look at the map below will demonstrate this fact. Given what is termed the facts on the ground, parlance that replaces theft with the consequences of power, one can see that there is no way that a Palestinian state could be formed simply because the bits and pieces left are not themselves contiguous and do not include all of Palestine or the Palestinian people; Gaza is not included in this new initiative. Thus while Abbas must not state any preconditions, he must also accept the mandate of Israel and the United States that Gaza is no longer a part of Palestine nor are its people.

How strange that a people can be split asunder by those that determine it to be an enemy when in fact it is a legitimately elected government for the people of Gaza as it had been a major portion of the united Palestinian people before Israel and the US declared it to be a terrorist organization. Israel savages Lebanon in 2006, invades Gaza in a murderous rampage during the season of peace at Christmas in 2008-2009, attacks a fleet of peaceful protestors to Israel’s illegal control of international waters as they sailed to bring medical supplies to the besieged people of Gaza while they assassinated 8 Turkish citizens and an American Turkish teenager, and they are immune from prosecution because the US vetoes the justified efforts by the UN to bring them before the International courts. The Israeli state began as a terrorist organization against the British Mandate Government from the 1930s through to May of 1948 (see Introduction in The Plight of the Palestinians, Macmillan 2010); it has continued to use terrorism against the people of Palestine and the people of Lebanon and Iraq and Syria and Egypt and the United States ever since. Yet we, the United States of America, support, or more correctly our representatives support in our name, this terrorist organization that hides its reality by elections.

Since most of the people in the educated world understand the realities of the above paragraph, it has become necessary for Israel and the US to find yet another deception to continue the “cleansing” of Palestinians out of “Judea and Samaria” the names that replace in Israel the land of the Palestinians, the West Bank and the Palestinian portion of Jerusalem. They have turned to the Golden Calf.

Like the Trojan Horse, the Golden Calf is a sculpted image from another ancient text, the Bible, that deceived the followers of Moses to replace him as their leader since he had disappeared up the mountain and they felt insecure. Aaron fashioned all the gold trinkets the people could find and made the image of the calf or bull since it is not clear exactly what was fashioned. Scholars differ on what this image represents; bulls and calves were common in Near Eastern religions (Dr. Jeffrey Tigay, The JPS Torah Commentary). Interestingly, the Egyptian God Ptah is represented by a bull, a sacred animal that symbolizes his soul on earth who gave fertility and rebirth to the people.

Perhaps that is what the followers of Moses wanted to remember since they had just fled from Egypt and quite obviously the God Ptah is more of a uniting g-d than Yhwh who is, as the book of Exodus points out, a Merciless God.

“25 Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. 26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord , come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.

27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord , the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart this day.”

30 The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord ; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

From the Golden Calf of Ptah to a god of destruction of his own people, the b iblical myth sets two necessities for the followers of Moses, obedience to a merciless, unseen god and dependence on an intermediary to gain atonement. Such are the rights of those lashed to a mythical god.

But this is a mythical tale after all since current archeology and historical accuracy of the Bible has determined that the Exodus never happened. “The saga of Israel’s growing conflict with Egypt is neither historical truth nor literary fiction. It is a powerful expression of memory and hope born in a world in the midst of change” (Finkelstein and Silberman, The Bible Unearthed , 2001).

The story of the exodus served immediate political and military ends to rally the people with “a saga of a new beginning reminding them of their own difficulties and giving them hope for the future” (70). How important then to use this image to achieve political and military ends as the Zionists fear the split of “their” Palestine with the indigenous inhabitants, yea even to deceive your own people to assure power through fear.

How then gain sympathy for their plight? How make the world understand that this is yet another taking of Jewish land? How rally the world with their compassion, their generosity, their mercy for the downtrodden then to offer four billion in gold to the Palestinians that they might rise to new heights of civilization by building stores and apartments and industries and eateries and homes and Disney like entertainment parks on the land left to them, approximately 10-12% depending on whether or not one takes in the checkpoints and towers and the wall that sneaks in to capture hundreds of dunams beyond those established by Resolution 242, the green line.

Thus does the Golden Calf become the lure to enslave the people to the god of greed as the biblical story unfolds once again. So today the Zionists proffer their gold to the Palestinians to be the reason for their being seeking to touch the depths of their despair and humiliation by offerings that have led them to this pit of human degradation where the stuff of this world negates the values of the mind and soul and heart in favor of perfumes and satins and silks, and debauchery.

“6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt,have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’”

But the Palestinians did not come out of the land of Egypt anymore than the Israelis did. They have lived in Palestine for millenniums’ and know the sacredness of the land that their fathers and mothers deeded to them with hearts filled with love and the keys to match, while the Israelis fled to other places or converted to the truths of Christianity or the faith of Allah. So what does Secretary Kerry’s four billion and his deadline mean to the Palestinians?

It’s obvious what it means to Netanyahu: it means freedom to do what he wants to do, delay, delay, delay till more and more land can be swallowed by Israel and the chance of a Palestinian state is a mirage of the past. It means total subjugation of the people to the rule of Israel, not as an equal state but as a neighboring territory that has no freedom of movement, no currency of its own, no independent economy, no government that can do more than police the people of Palestine on behalf of Israel, no judicial system that acts contrary to Israeli courts, no access to the sky except through the Israeli airport, no egress and ingress unless approved by the IDF, no access to the farms separated by the wall without IDF approval, no border on the east except that created by Israel to annex the best agricultural land in Palestine, a necessity to defend the state of Israel, no free movement between the Palestinian Bantustans and the Palestinian families, friends and neighbors in Gaza without Israeli control of the borders between their accepted Palestinian territories and that of a baptized terrorist state, no accepted government approved by Israel that will permit the people of Palestine to determine laws that apply to them, no access to the settler network of highways that lace the Palestinians’ land for fear of terrorist activity and hence necessary to defend the Israelis, in essence no freedoms, no rights, no state, no justice. This is what Israel will gain and what the Palestinians will get for their acceptance of four billion in gold that glitters in the noon-day sun but sheds not a ray of light on the soul.

This deception is not lost on the Arab world nor on the citizens of most of Europe, England, Australia, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy or the nations east of Europe. America stands alone with its arms around the most condemned state on the planet, the state of Israel that dances to its own tunes as it celebrates its impunity for crimes committed against citizens of many nations, its arrogance against the world body that it joined and effectively and defiantly mocks as irrelevant, and its sadistic action to force the world to accept the hypocritical London Declaration of Anti- Semitism that will silence all criticism of the state of Israel as renewed Anti-Semitism and punishable by law.

As it rampages through the decades defiantly destroying International Laws as established in concert with all peoples on the earth through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Geneva Accords, it moves now to force all to accept its dictates to determine what they will and what they cannot criticize or believe. This they call the London Declaration of Anti-Semitism, a global silencing of criticism of this rogue state; this they call democracy, freedom, and liberty. How evil the deception, how steeped in indifference to the human plight, how arrogant and loathsome, how humiliating to the individual soul, how in keeping with a mindset ruled by obedience to a system, a commanding agency, and determined by the few to minister to the many.

When we consider what might have been, we may weep for the innocents slaughtered in the fulfillment of the Zionist dream that took America to war against Iraq, and Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and Syria, and the ultimate goal of Israel, Iran, we will understand that our youth fought to save Israel’s soldiers from facing the death that awaited them on these battlefields while we watched the people of the world turn against the American values that gave us credibility throughout the world and lashed us t o the mast of Zionist madness.

William A. Cook is a Professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He writes frequently for Internet publications including The Palestine Chronicle, MWC News, Atlantic Free Press, Pacific Free Press, Countercurrents, Counterpunch, World Prout Assembly, Dissident Voice, and Information Clearing House among others. His books include Tracking Deception: Bush Mid-East policy, The Rape of Palestine, The Chronicles of Nefaria, a novella, and the forthcoming The Plight of the Palestinians. He can be reached at wcook@laverne.edu or www.drwilliamacook.com

Exodus 32

New International Version (NIV)

The Golden Calf

32 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods [ a ] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”

2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods, [ b ] Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”

5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord .” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.

7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt,have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’

9 “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. 10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”

11 But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “ Lord ,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” 14 Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.

15 Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands.They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. 16 The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.

17 When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “There is the sound of war in the camp.”

18 Moses replied:

“It is not the sound of victory,
it is not the sound of defeat;
it is the sound of singing that I hear.”

19 When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. 20 And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.

21 He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”

22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”

25 Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. 26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord , come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.

27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord , the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”

30 The next day Moses said to the people, “You have committed a great sin. But now I will go up to the Lord ; perhaps I can make atonement for your sin.”

31 So Moses went back to the Lord and said, “Oh, what a great sin these people have committed!They have made themselves gods of gold. 32 But now, please forgive their sin—but if not, then blot me out of the book you have written.”

33 The Lord replied to Moses, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book. 34 Now go, lead the people to the place I spoke of, and my angel will go before you. However, when the time comes for me to punish, I will punish them for their sin.”

35 And the Lord struck the people with a plague because of what they did with the calf Aaron had made.